Designed by Amy Wibowo, Daisuke Sakamoto, Jun Mitani, and Takeo Igarashi at the University of Tokyo, Japan, DressUp is a three-dimensional draping system that allows designers to create digital sketches of a garment on a real dress form. The system consists of a dress form, motion-tracking cutting and adding tools, custom software, and a display for viewing your digital design.

Once the garment is digitally draped, a 2D pattern is generated. The system is designed to be used by creatives who have little technical patternmaking skills.

The dress form itself functions not only as a tangible surface for designers to sketch on, but also as a way of controlling the perspective of the visual display. Rotating the form, for examples, also rotates the digital image.

The idea of digital draping is fascinating but the implicit weakness of this project is that it ignores the actual materiality of garments. The same pattern created with different fabrics will fall entirely differently on the body. Unless they incorporate a digital fabric library that can simulate the drape of various fabric types (silk vs denim), digital draping will be mired in the very same trappings of all augmented reality projects.